KSQL Impersonation

Describes impersonation for Kafka KSQL.

The HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Event Store implementation performs impersonation on behalf of KSQL CLI users in KSQL Servers. Impersonation authorizes the impersonated user to perform permission-sensitive operations. In secure clusters, impersonation is enabled by default. In insecure clusters, impersonation is disabled by default.

Requirement: For impersonation to work, KSQL authentication must be enabled; otherwise, the server will not start and the system will return an error. When authentication is enabled, all commands run as the authenticated user instead of the KSQL principal. The KSQL principal is the user that started KSQL server.

You can enable or disable impersonation for KSQL in the /opt/mapr/ksql/ksql-<version>/etc/ksql/ksql-server.properties file through the following option:
impersonation.enable=[true|false]